Washington D.C., Jan 20, 2025 / 04:00 am (CNA).
Sister Mary Antona Ebo was the only Black Catholic nun who marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.
“I’m here because I’m a Negro, a nun, a Catholic, and because I want to bear witness,” Ebo said to fellow demonstrators at a March 10, 1965, protest attended by King.
The protest took place three days after the “Bloody Sunday” clash, where police attacked several hundred voting rights demonstrators with clubs and tear gas, causing severe injuries among the nonviolent marchers.
Sister Mary Antona Ebo died Nov. 11, 2017, in Bridgeton, Missouri, at the age of 93, the St. Louis Review reported at the time.
After the “Bloody Sunday” attacks, King had called on church leaders from around the country to go to Selma. Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis asked his archdiocese’s human rights commission to send representatives, Ebo recounted to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2015.
Ebo’s supervisor, also a religious sister, asked her whether she would join a 50-member delegation of laymen, Protestant ministers, rabbis, priests, and five white nuns.
Just before she left for Alabama, she heard that a white minister who had traveled to Selma, James Reeb, had been severely attacked after he left a restaurant and later died from his injuries.
At the time, Ebo said, she wondered: “If they would beat a white minister to death on the streets of Selma, what are they going to do when I show up?”
In Selma on March 10, Ebo went to Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, joining local leaders and the demonstrators who had been injured in the clash.
“They had bandages on their heads, teeth were knocked out, crutches, casts on their arms. You could tell that they were freshly injured,” she told the Post-Dispatch. “They had already been through the battleground, and they were still wanting to go back and finish the job.”
Many of the injured were treated at Good Samaritan Hospital, run by Edmundite priests and the Sisters of St. Joseph, the only Selma hospital that served Blacks. Since their arrival in 1937, the Edmundites had faced intimidation and threats from local officials, other whites, and even the Ku Klux Klan, CNN reported.
The injured demonstrators and their supporters left the Selma church, with Ebo in front. They marched toward the courthouse, then were blocked by state troopers in riot gear. She and other demonstrators knelt to pray the Our Father before they agreed to turn around.
Despite the violent interruption, the 57-mile march drew 25,000 participants. It concluded on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery with King’s famous March 25 speech against racial prejudice.
“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” King said.
King would be dead within three years. On a fateful April 4, 1968, he was shot by an assassin at a Memphis hotel.
He had asked to be taken to a Catholic hospital should anything happen to him, and he was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in Memphis. At the time, it was a nursing school combined with a 400-bed hospital.
There, too, Catholic religious sisters played a role.
Sister Jane Marie Klein and Sister Anna Marie Hofmeyer recounted their story to The Paper of Montgomery County Online in January 2017.
The Franciscan nuns were walking around the hospital grounds when they heard the sirens of an ambulance. One of the sisters was paged three times, and they discovered that King had been shot and taken to their hospital.
The National Guard and local police locked down the hospital for security reasons as doctors tried to save King.
“We were obviously not allowed to go in when they were working with him because they were feverishly working with him,” Klein said. “But after they pronounced him dead we did go back into the ER. There was a gentleman as big as the door guarding the door and he looked at us and said, ‘You want in?’ We said yes, we’d like to go pray with him. So he let the three of us in, closed the door behind us, and gave us our time.”
Hofmeyer recounted the scene in the hospital room. “He had no chance,” she said.
Klein said authorities delayed the announcement of King’s death to prepare for riots they knew would result.
Three decades later, Klein met with King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, at a meeting of the Catholic Health Association Board in Atlanta where King was a keynote speaker. The Franciscan sister and the widow of the civil rights leader told each other how they had spent that night.
Klein said being present that night in 1968 was “indescribable.”
“You do what you got to do,” she said. “What’s the right thing to do? Hindsight? It was a privilege to be able to take care of him that night and to pray with him. Who would have ever thought that we would be that privileged?”
She said King’s life shows “to some extent one person can make a difference.” She wondered “how anybody could listen to Dr. King and not be moved to work toward breaking down these barriers.”
Klein would serve as chairperson of the Franciscan Alliance Board of Trustees, overseeing support for health care. Hofmeyer would work in the alliance’s archives. In 2021, both were living at the Provinciate at St. Francis Convent in Mishawaka, Indiana.
For her part, after Selma, Ebo would go on to serve as a hospital administrator and a chaplain.
In 1968 she helped found the National Black Sisters’ Conference. The woman who had been rejected from several Catholic nursing schools because of her race would serve in her congregation’s leadership as it reunited with another Franciscan order, and she served as a director of social concerns for the Missouri Catholic Conference.
She frequently spoke on civil rights topics. When controversy erupted over a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer’s killing of Michael Brown, a Black man, she led a prayer vigil. She thought the Ferguson protests were comparable to those of Selma.
“I mean, after all, if Mike Brown really did swipe the box of cigars, it’s not the policeman’s place to shoot him dead,” she said.
Archbishop Robert J. Carlson of St. Louis presided at her requiem Mass in November 2021, saying in a statement: “We will miss her living example of working for justice in the context of our Catholic faith.”
A previous version of this article was originally published on CNA on Jan. 17, 2022.
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In the politics of today, we must remember that King still based his case on the universal natural law, instead of our recent woke mind bending. This, from his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (April 16, 1963):
“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
It’s good that King affirmed the natural law, a genuine rectitude written into the nature of things, but experience teaches that it ought not to be mirrored perfectly in human civic law. That is why many immoral and unjust acts are permitted in civic life, but not approved of (think prostitution, gluttony, etc).
In my opinion, the civil rights movement was very weak in its relation to real justice. Sentimental, simplistically unthoughtful Catholics played a huge role in furthering this movement (e.g., LaFarge, Hesburgh)
Take certain southern-style segregation policies: these did not automatically imply injustice. A certain state has decided that public harmony is better preserved by keeping the races separate (in certain aspects of life) rather than virtually forcing them to be together.
The principle of “separate but equal” may be difficult to bring about but the difficult is not the same as the impossible.
Is it “evil” to have a black public high school and a white public high school, provided that funding, etc. is proportional/just?
On the level of private institutions, the excesses of the civil rights movement are even clearer. If the owner of a diner finds, through experience, that segregated seating promotes harmony and the satisfaction of the customers, why can’t such a policy be permitted to him? Aren’t there ordinary common law liberties associated with the ownership of property?
Then there is the constitutional issue: the range of influence permitted to the federal government over the states. It could be argued that much “civil rights” policy violated the constitution.
A final point re: the unjust affirmative action/DEI policies of today: these have their roots in the civil “rights” agenda of “reparation to minorities.” So, esp. if one is the victim of these policies, one should lessen one’s regard for the civil rights movement.
King is arguably the most overrated public figure in history.
How many Catholics know the following facts about MLK?
1) His original name is not Martin Luther King, Jr. but Michael King, Jr. When his father Michael King, Sr., changed his own name to Martin Luther King, Sr. (probably because it was a “cool” Protestant revolutionary name), the son followed suit.
2) Most of his “great writings” including the letter from jail, the “I have a dream” speech and his doctoral dissertation are plagiarized. (Re: the latter, he was given a pass by his progressive dissertation director, probably in deference to the wishes of Boston University.)
3) Many black intellectuals (e.g. Zora Neale Hurston) thought he was a simple “race grifter.”
4) He used SCLC funds to hire hookers, whom he often beat. His last night was spent in such an orgy.
5) He was closely associated with known communists and communist-oriented organizations throughout his life. (I realize this is not necessarily a sin, but it is, literally, a “red flag.”)
It is to be hoped, of course, that he repented of his sins before he died.
But it is certainly a shame and a disorder that such a man is honored more than any other American figure (including George Washington).
And, I repeat, the rectitude of the policies he engendered is very dubious.